What controversial joke almost never made it into Neighbors?
In the current box office number one film, Neighbors, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne’s baby eats a condom that has been left on the lawn by the frat. That joke has been in the trailers… but the follow up it has not. Jason Mantzoukas (The Dictator, Baby Mama) plays a doctor who meets with Rogen and Byrne. He enters the scene and says, "Your baby has HIV." And after a brutally long pause, continues, "Is how bad this could have gone." As you can begin to imagine, that's can send audiences two ways— into utter hilarity, or utter disgust. But the joke, almost didn’t make the cut.
Nicholas Stoller said during the editing process, they left too much of a pause between the two lines. In that delicate moment, the test audiences felt that the movie had gone too far. He said:
[i]"We timed it wrong. ‘Your baby has HIV,’ and the pause was too long. And the audience was like, ‘Fuck this movie!’ They turned on us. They told us that we had to cut that joke. I said, let’s just try it. Let’s just try. I swear, if we just trim frames, we can make this work!"
